Elegant in plainness, the classic poet would have said of her hair and dress.  She was of the women whose wits are quick in everything they do.  That which was proper to her position, complexion, and the hour, surely marked her appearance.  Unaccountably this night, the fair fleshly presence over-weighted her intellectual distinction, to an observer bent on vindicating her innocence.  Or rather, he saw the hidden in the visible.

Owner of such a woman, and to lose her!  Redworth pitied the husband.

The crackling flames reddened her whole person.  Gazing, he remembered Lady Dunstane saying of her once, that in anger she had the nostrils of a war-horse.  The nostrils now were faintly alive under some sensitive impression of her musings.  The olive cheeks, pale as she stood in the doorway, were flushed by the fire-beams, though no longer with their swarthy central rose, tropic flower of a pure and abounding blood, as it had seemed.  She was now beset by battle.  His pity for her, and his eager championship, overwhelmed the spirit of compassion for the foolish wretched husband.  Dolt, the man must be, Redworth thought; and he asked inwardly, Did the miserable tyrant suppose of a woman like this, that she would be content to shine as a candle in a grated lanthorn?  The generosity of men speculating upon other men’s possessions is known.  Yet the man who loves a woman has to the full the husband’s jealousy of her good name.  And a lover, that without the claims of the alliance, can be wounded on her behalf, is less distracted in his homage by the personal luminary, to which man’s manufacture of balm and incense is mainly drawn when his love is wounded.  That contemplation of her incomparable beauty, with the multitude of his ideas fluttering round it, did somewhat shake the personal luminary in Redworth.  He was conscious of pangs.  The question bit him:  How far had she been indiscreet or wilful? and the bite of it was a keen acid to his nerves.  A woman doubted by her husband, is always, and even to her champions in the first hours of the noxious rumour, until they had solidified in confidence through service, a creature of the wilds, marked for our ancient running.  Nay, more than a cynical world, these latter will be sensible of it.  The doubt casts her forth, the general yelp drags her down; she runs like the prey of the forest under spotting branches; clear if we can think so, but it has to be thought in devotedness:  her character is abroad.  Redworth bore a strong resemblance to, his fellowmen, except for his power of faith in this woman.  Nevertheless it required the superbness of her beauty and the contrasting charm of her humble posture of kneeling by the fire, to set him on his right track of mind.  He knew and was sure of her.  He dispersed the unhallowed fry in attendance upon any stirring of the reptile part of us, to look at her with the eyes of a friend.  And if . . . !—­a little mouse of a thought scampered out of one of the chambers of his head and darted along the passages, fetching a sweat to his brows.  Well, whatsoever the fact, his heart was hers!  He hoped he could be charitable to women.